Irony and Its Discontent

By

Sam Sacks

Aug. 29, 2012 6:49 p.m. ET

There's a scene in "Infinite Jest" (1996) that gets at the insoluble contradiction in the writing of David Foster Wallace. It's set in Ennet House, a Boston rehab facility where Don Gately, the book's hero, is a live-in staff member. A new resident has arrived and begun belittling the mantras of recovery theology. "I came here to learn to live by clichés," he sneers, and rattles off easily mockable slogans: Grow or go, it works if you work it, have an attitude of gratitude. Gately, who has been clean for over a year, puts up with the ridicule patiently: Though he can't understand how, he knows that those slogans have saved his life. The clichés of the recovering addict constitute, as he puts it, "the truth unslanted, unfortified. And maximally unironic."

For the reader of "Infinite Jest," however, that very sentiment seems quite ironic, since it appears in the middle of one of the most vertiginously slanted, steroidally fortified books ever written: an immense, unstructured shaggy-dog novel with hundreds of characters, the thinnest shred of a plot, an indeterminate conclusion, and 100 pages of endnotes.

The two sides of David Foster Wallace—the compulsive overelaborator and the staunch believer in simple truisms—are present in D.T. Max's biography "Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story." Like all the books published about the novelist following his suicide in 2008, at the age of 46—particularly David Lipsky's lovely "Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself" (2010)—Mr. Max's depiction treats its subject generously. The author is more focused on celebrating the bravery of Wallace's battle against manic depression and drug addiction than the brilliance of his writing. Readers familiar with the fiction may find Mr. Max's literary analysis one-dimensional. But all readers, even those who know nothing of Wallace, will be moved by the portrayal of one man's honest struggle with mental illness.

Wallace grew up in a warm, supportive household in suburban Illinois but experienced "depressive, clinically anxious feelings" from as early as age 9, he later recounted. Crippling anxiety would be the handmaiden to his intellectual activity. At Amherst, where he studied philosophy and wrote his first fiction as an undergraduate, he suffered his first breakdowns and began taking antidepressants, to which he often added marijuana and alcohol. Wallace sold his first novel, "The Broom of the System" (1987), while he was still in graduate school studying creative writing, but afterward, in hard succession, he broke down again, nearly overdosed on sleeping pills and submitted to electro-convulsive therapy. The pressures of success tended to aggravate his conditions.

Shortly after the publication of his debut short-story collection, "The Girl With Curious Hair" (1989), Wallace was admitted to the halfway house that would be the model for Ennet House in "Infinite Jest." "Sometimes I'm scared or feel superior or both," he wrote of his time there in one of the many disarmingly candid letters quoted in the biography. Mr. Max argues that rehab, where he bunked with ex-convicts and serious drug addicts, changed Wallace's life—and his work. The man who began his career as a postmodern maximalist would struggle with great effort, and ultimately unsuccessfully, to incorporate the "maximally unironic" into his writing.

ENLARGE

Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story

By D.T. Max (Viking, 356 pages, $27.95)

"Creativity," Mr. Max writes of Wallace, "was tied to the manic part of his personality." The author suggests, in essence, that Wallace's distinctive style, his unchecked flood tide of words, was a byproduct of his malady. He notes that the novelist frequently, and notoriously, employed endnotes in his fiction because they were "almost like having a second voice in your head." The willful difficulty of the novels, in Mr. Max's account, was a response to their creator's own addictive tendencies. A smooth story arc, Wallace felt, fed an addiction to commercial entertainment. (The title of "Infinite Jest" refers to a film that is entertaining it kills its viewers.) He made his books awkward and left them unresolved in order to force readers to pay closer attention.

Yet Wallace, after the halfway house, would become a sober, dedicated practitioner of the lifestyle of recovery. "Suddenly, in his eyes," Mr. Max writes, "sincerity was a virtue and saying what you meant a calling." The soulfulness that infused parts of "Infinite Jest" and Wallace's later books reflected his reformation as an "acolyte of careful living and hard work." Wallace found a way to write steadily without crashing out (along with his fiction, he produced two much-loved essay collections). He was a passionately involved teacher, at Illinois State and then Pomona College; a committed friend to many; and a neurotically devoted dog owner. In 2002 he met the visual artist Karen Green, and the two had what was by all accounts a very happy marriage.

The problem, Mr. Max writes, was that he was never able to make the overloaded, hyperkinetic style he had developed as a young man fit his converted belief in "single-entendre principles," as he put it in his 1993 essay "E Unibus Pluram." "How could you preach mindful calmness if you couldn't replicate it in prose?" Mr. Max asks. Wallace's final novel, "The Pale King" (2011), is, in its unfinished form, as baggy and circumlocutive as any of the previous books. He "had never really found a verbal strategy to replace his inborn one," Mr. Max concludes.

Yet if the judgment of the biography is that Wallace's promise as a writer was incomplete at the time of his death, the portrayal of the latter half of his life is deeply sympathetic and surprisingly inspiring. Knowing he could never be cured of his depression and addictive tendencies, Wallace threw himself into continuous rehabilitation. Mr. Max reproduces a scribbled note in which Wallace had written: "What Balance Would Look Like." The list includes "2-3 hours a day writing"; "Daily exercise"; "2 nights/week spent with other friends"; "5 week" (meaning recovery meetings). Although "Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story" necessarily ends on the tragic note of Wallace's suicide, its poignancy is in its emphasis on his years of hard-earned survival and his efforts, though unrealized, toward artistic transformation.

This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. Distribution and use of this material are governed by our Subscriber Agreement and by copyright law. For non-personal use or to order multiple copies, please contact Dow Jones Reprints at 1-800-843-0008 or visit www.djreprints.com.